Keeping the finger on the pulse – Hybrid healthcare and pro health checkups

When I penned Roadmap 2021, I wrote about being innovative and continuously accelerating the technology adoption while coping with post first wave havoc. The Covid-19 pandemic has undoubtedly accelerated the adoption of telehealth, transforming the patient and practitioner experience. While mostly positive, I feel this transformation has also created growing pains as patients and doctors adapt to new technologies and workflows.

Telehealth adoption had already doubled between 2016 and 2021 – from 14 percent to 28 percent – with the pandemic. But I believe that this trend would not last forever as healthcare is always about personal touch. As the pandemic subsides, patients will once again want to see their doctors face-to-face.

Therefore, the plan is adoption of hybrid healthcare that brings together the best of telehealth and in-person treatment. While telehealth and in-person care each offer unique benefits and drawbacks, combined they create a synergistic model that delivers better, more cost-effective healthcare, and more satisfied patients.

While we see the third wave already knocking on the door of 2022, let us hope that Omicron is the trigger for this pandemic to become an endemic. Then we would be able to live with it as we live with influenza and common cold. Meanwhile, it is important to look at the real, underlying pandemic of non-communicable diseases (NCDs), which must be addressed immediately with hybrid models. Hybrid healthcare models will help in an efficient and effective health service delivery in countries like India with vast geographies, which have healthcare accessibility challenges, especially in rural areas.

We are also setting up a new outreach center at Jodhpur, Rajasthan, similar to the Apollo Outreach Center functional at Udaipur to provide specialty consultation, medical store, and lab investigation services. These clinics cater to the distant locations and increase the accessibility and outreach of super-specialty consultants with the use of tele-health technologies.

Also, we are operating remote ICUs to provide critical care services to the nearby rural regions, which helps to strengthen the healthcare facilities at rural areas with the help of tele-ICU technologies. As we know, India faces a dearth of intensive care beds and specialists with only 95,000 ICU beds and 4500 intensivists in the country. Tele-ICU makes remote care accessible and enables communication between off-site clinicians and bedside staff to provide real-time patient care, using teleconsultation and IoT-linked devices for remediation and timely intervention.

The pandemic taught us that evolution is critical to stay in business, which can be achieved by embracing technology. We adopted several technological interventions in the form of virtual consultation, telehealth, use of AI for predictive analysis in laboratories, digital health records, and many more. The use of EMR in hospitals has also shown an upward drift, which is a great news, and our hospital has 70 percent compliance to the use of digital health records in OPD and 100 percent in IP.

The increased adoption of AI and digital technology has brought a paradigm shift in the healthcare scenario, and the future will see doctors equipped with AI to fight against the rising burden of NCDs. An example of this is collaboration of Apollo Hospitals with Microsoft for an intelligent platform to predict cardiovascular risk score in Indian population. Doctors across Apollo network are using this AI-powered API to predict the risk of CVD and drive predictive cardiac care across the country. Platforms for other NCDs like diabetes, hypertension, prevention of stroke and CVA are being developed.

2022 is expected to be a year of recovery and change and we are geared up with all equipment to serve the changing patient needs.

The author is Chief Operating Officer, Apollo Hospitals, Gujarat Region.